Leveling Up Tracker Time with Glowing VU Meters in the Byte Cellar

Lately, I’ve been spending time in the evenings listening to tracker tunes on my Gravis Ultrasound-equipped 486 PC. My go-to player program is Open CubicPlayer for DOS, which does a great job of both accurate playback and adjusting and sorting samples to work as well as possible within the GUS’s 1MB of wavetable RAM.

Now, of course I like das blinkenlights (as one does), and OCP offers a number of satisfying ways to light up the phosphor during MOD, S3M, IT, and XM playback. Recently, however, I spotted a free-standing LED VU Meter on the web that looked like it might be a welcome addition to my tracker player setup down in the Byte Cellar.

The unit is available from a variety of sources scattered across the globe, each of which seems to refer to the device by a different name while offering it at a different price. Digging around a bit, I have come to the conclusion that the actual name / description of this thing is something close to: “D’ESIGN R12 Rhythm Lights Voice Activated RGB Music Light LED w/ Pseudo Tubes.” Whew. It’s about 3.25-inches tall; 11-inches wide; has 12 LED bars, each in a tube with a mesh in front of it for a nixie-tube sort of look, all in a nice wooden frame; has a variety of color and display modes; and picks up on sounds in the room as input for its VU meter display. After initially seeing it offered at a higher price, I found it elsewhere for about $90 USD.

And, I love it! I have it sitting on top of the Tandy 1000HX, just down the desk from the aforementioned 486 (it’s an AMD 5×86 160, actually), and it adds enormously to the overall vibe of the room (which I wrote about in my last blog post) while listening to these tracks and watching demos. I usually run with the green fading-up-to-orange color scheme, as it reminds me of the bars in the original Soundtracker that I spent hours in on my old Amiga 2000, way back when.

The video above consists of a few quick and dirty clips I took with my iPhone to give a feel for the setup in action — forgive the crudeness. It’s an amazing little device that is really giving me my money’s worth as far as the enjoyment it brings me during tracker time. And, I kind-of want a second one….